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Tip for setting up printing

Well I haven't gotten my little catch with printing in WordPefect 8. In Mandrake I used cups with ghostscript and used the postscript passthrough in WP. However, in Woody it uses cups with gimp print. Though it does print the pages fine, it always spits out one extra page with garbage at the end of the job. Oh well. Anyway I ran into a problem and found a good solution. But you have to do the solution before you make the problem (totally confused? Follow) I tried using the WordPerfect driver for my printer. Needless to say it was no good. But I ran into a problem. I was printing out page upon page of two or three lines of garbage, spit th epage out and do another. I ran into this before. Thought in Debian it would work this time. No go. Problem is there was No way to stop this. AND I MEAN NO WAY! (at least no normal way) The file showed as already processed in localhost:631, the kde print manager showed no print jobs processing or waiting to be killed. And qtcups listed the printer as idle. But here it was spitting out crap. So I turned the computer off (shutdown nothing drastic) and turned off the printer and even unplugged it for a while. Well plugged the printer in, and turned it on.It initialized came on ok and sat there. No pages getting spit out, just sat waiting for a job. So I turned the computer on. It was going fine through the boot up until it initialized cupsd. Then it started all over again. even lpstat didn't show any jobs to be killed. So I wondered how the hell to get rid of this print job. It was stuck somewhere. Not inthe printer but in the software. I did some searches and came to the /var/spool directory. It showed listings for cups and lpr. Now the catch is that when I first got my computer setup, clean, I did a backup of the entire hard drive, each major directory at a time (boot, bin, usr (a big one) dev, and var among others) so I pulled the old dir out of the .gz back up I had created. I put it in temp. I renamed the old spool dir as spool.old (just in case) and copied the old spool from /tmp/var to /var, shut down the computer and rebooted. as the system initialized I waited for the last lines where cups came up. Bingo no garbage. Once again pointing out the value of backups. If history serves from the last time I tried to get these print drivers to work it would have gone through about 45 pages or garbage (though I just kept taking the same page and putting it back in, but it was a waste of ink) and there was no reset or kill command that would clear the job so it came to the down and dirty replacing the whole damn dir. So keep this in mind next time you get something stuck in the print que. Make the backup first.

Re:Tip for setting up printing

I got one question for you. I have wordpefect and I am using cups to print but for some odd reason I am not able to print. The only way I can is by printing to disk THEN doing a lpr foo.dsk I have tried the pass through ps driver but I can get it to print.

Re:Tip for setting up printing

Schotty. No neither is empty. But the files in them, when I open them show completed. I think these are previous print jobs that already completed. I did print stuff before (in mozilla).

GMoreno, what's the question. Is it how did I do it? in the printer setup (in WP) I chose the postscript passthrough, then clicked the setup button to the right and at the bottom is assign and I assign it to lp. (In Debian 3.0). And in k print manager I have the BJC-240 (My printer) set as user default. Now in Mandrake I had 0 problems setting this up but in Debian this was my one hard problem I had since the setup was different.

Re:Tip for setting up printing

Well the reason I asked, is if there was crud left over from the previous print job, it could do the exact same thing as what you experienced. I would have vaped out anything left over in those dirs first. Then worried about a backup. But thats me

Re:Tip for setting up printing

Re:Tip for setting up printing

GMoreno:

Do you have a printer setup already? Does it print the test page? If so there shouldn't be a problem. Also for cups to work with lp you need the cups-bsd utils Forget the actual name of the package. Anyway. When you create the printer in WP and go to setup go to the bottom is a tab that says destination. click on it. There should be three lines there $printer, file and lp. choose lp then ok. It should work as long as you have your cups printer set as system default. If not what does happen?

Schotty. I had the printer all setup and fine up to that point so I figure anything left over is just logs or old info that was finished and doesn't matter now. Since it only did that with the changed setting. But if it was bad from the beginning I would have cleared the dir.